In my unrelenting effort to make enemies and alienate people, I am starting, today, a Running Thesaurus of Offensive Quotations. It’s been called “Error Messages” to suggest it does not fear contradiction or indeed, wrongness. Truths are paradoxes, and almost every point worth pursuing can be turned constructively on its head.

Still: I make no bones of the fact, dear reader, that I am a truth-hunter, a girl who needs and wants to identify larger axioms, general insights, be they damning or inspiring. (I prefer the inspiring ones, but the damning ones can clear a lot of brush too.) I’m a girl who is not loathe to say “should”—partly because I was brought up on Emerson and Samuel Jonson, both of whom talk like oracles a lot of the time–and I enjoy that. Partly because I was not brought up in boarding school and “should” is simply a way to say “hey!” to me: Hey, think about this for a sec.

I am always needing to take myself by the scruff of the neck like that. Fatigued most days by my five floor walk-up, beloved disabled toddler, debatable lifestyle habits and  impractical jobs, I need to yell to hear my own inner voice sometimes. So let’s yell. Or rather: talk clear, assume authority, and see where the chips fall. Like Whitman, we are all large, we all contradict ourselves,  we all “contain multitudes.